Swing the Spinning Step
by Lisa Telramor
Summary: Ed never thought she'd get the girl. Ed/Win, Always a girl!Ed.


Ed has to stand on her toes to press into the kiss and Winry has to lean a bit down but it feels soft and warm and perfect like Ed barely dared to hope. Winry pulls back and Ed opens eyes she doesn't remember closing. Winry's smiling. She has bags under her eyes from pulling an all-nighter for someone's automail and her hair's standing up at angles from where Ed ran her fingers through it. She's the most beautiful Ed can remember.

"You broke it again?!" Winry tossed a wrench at Ed's head. It clangs off Al when Ed ducks to the side.

WMWMWM

"Al!" Ed gasps.

"Shoot, sorry, Al."

"No, sorry, Ed, I almost killed you?" Ed snaps.

Winry snorts, crossing her arms. "Your head needs a few screws knocked back in place since you keep breaking my art. What did you do this time? Punch a wall?"

"Uh." Ed supposes punching a homunculus that turned to hardened carbon ranked up with punching a wall. And then there was the other stress she put on it.

Winry throws her hands up. "Al, I'm counting on you to keep her from being an idiot."

"Yes, ma'am!" Al says quickly. He's still on the defensive like he expects another wrench to fly at him.

"Traitor," Ed mutters.

"Sister, she has a point. You don't take very good care of it."

"Yeah, yeah." Ed braces her flesh arm on her hip. She needs an arm to use. What point is there to having it if she didn't use it to its fullest? "Winry, my port's been bothering me a bit too."

Winry's irritated expression vanishes. "Have you been using the cream from last time?"

"Yeah. Well. You'll see." Ed follows Winry toward the workrooms, leaving Al to find Granny Pinako. She tries not to get too flustered about the fact that Winry's going to be looking at her shirtless for the next however long again.

WMWMWM

"When I get older, I'm going to marry Winry," Al says, chubby cheeks dimpling in a grin. He cried when Ed poked them to see how deep the indent went the other day. He cried when Winry dropped a spider down his shirt too, so Ed thinks he's too soft for Winry who will pick up bugs without flinching and helps Ed hunt for frogs in the cow pond. Al's still too little to wade out into the muck like they do.

Ed laughs. "Winry wouldn't marry you. I'm going to marry Winry when I'm older."

"Nuh-uh." Al pouts. "Boys marry girls. You're a girl."

"Then I'll grow up to be a boy and then marry her." Ed sits up on her elbows to scowl at Al. In five year old logic it makes perfect sense. If she stops wearing the dresses Mom picks out and cuts her hair short like Al's she'll be a boy and then it won't matter.

"That's not how it works!"

"Well I'm still gonna be the one to marry Winry!"

They glare at each other and Al says, "But Miss Jenny said it doesn't work that way. I'm a boy so I can marry Winry."

Ed isn't really sure how it got from shouting to fists, but neither she nor Al will tell Mom what they were fighting about later. Ed stops wearing skirts after that day though.

WMWMWM

"—the scarring shouldn't be so red," Winry says. She's leaning over Ed's shoulder port where it attaches to her chest, tracing the skin along the edge of the port where it is pink and hot. The touch hurts, but Ed has to stop from shivering with Winry's face inches from her breasts. "—doing something differently?"

"What?"

Winry rolls her eyes. "I asked if you were doing anything differently."

"No." Ed blinks at her and looks away because Winry is kneeling there. She doesn't know when the feelings started but they never really went away like she assumed they would once she got older. She was supposed to notice boys, right? Winry noticed boys. Well. And automail. But also boys.

"Maybe your chest is growing then. If the skin is stretching that could interfere with the port." She touches Ed's chest again and it is all Ed can do not to squirm.

The periodic table. Hydrogen, Helium, Lithium…

"I don't want that getting infected though. I'll get you some cream to help the skin from getting inflamed or infected. It should help it with the stretching too." Winry smiles. If Ed wasn't focused elsewhere she would have seen the teasing glint. "And here I thought you'd have a tomboy figure forever."

"Wh-who's flat as a board?!" Ed sputters.

"Not you anymore."

Ed swipes at her and Winry skips back, laughing.

"I'll be right back."

She sweeps from the room and Ed clenches a hand over her heart that's beating too fast.

WMWMWM

Their faces are inches apart, breath coming in angry pants from their most recent argument. As usual it devolves into name calling.

"Tech-geek," Ed hisses.

"Alchemy-freak," Winry growls back.

Ed can feel Winry's breath on her cheek and smell the scent of her shampoo—lemon. An inch closer and she could kiss Winry. All the fury bubbling under skin is gone in a flash at this realization and her glare falters. Winry blinks and blushes.

Whirling away with a pout she calls, "This time is costing you double!"

"It always costs me double!" Ed calls after her. She thinks she didn't give herself away too much. But she has to wonder about why Winry blushed.

WMWMWM

"Really, Fullmetal," Mustang sighs, "would it kill you to wear the uniform for once? It's your alchemy exam."

Ed scowls. "I'll wear that uniform when hell freezes over."

"What, afraid of the skirt?" Mustang teases.

"Like hell!" Ed launches a kick to his face. She likes aiming for the head. It makes her feel bigger, especially with the weight of her combat boots behind the blow. Mustang ducks it with a smug grin.

"You're so short, a mini skirt would probably be regulation length on you."

"Say that to my fist, Bastard!"

"I guess the exam has started," Al says to Hawkeye. They watch alchemy flare around the open space, chased by bursts of fire. Ed's shrieks are punctuated by explosions and booms of alchemical reactions.

"It looks to be so." Hawkeye says.

"Is sister going to be in trouble for not wearing the uniform?" Al asks.

"No." Hawkeye smiles. "The Colonel doesn't really care if she wears it or not, and Ed is a high enough ranking that most people don't have the clout to make a fuss out of it. Besides, a skirt isn't mandatory for the women's uniform anyway."

Al laughs.

Ed creates an insulting dummy of Mustang and proceeds to blow it up to give example of what she plans to do once she manages to catch him.

WMWMWM

"You remember when we were little we fought over who would marry Winry?" Al asks.

"Yeah." The sky is blue and the clouds look like bits of cotton balls all fluffed up. Her side aches but the sunlight feels good on her face. "Mom was so mad at us for fighting and we wouldn't even say why."

"Winry thought we were being bullied and threatened to hit whoever did it."

"And hit us both when she realized we hurt each other."

Al laughs. It's a good sound even though it echoes in his armor. Al reaches out to take Ed's flesh hand. Ed has a flashback to when they were children and a happy Al reaching out just because he wanted the connection between them. She smiles, a warm feeling in her chest at the memory. "I won that fight."

"You did not!" Ed protests, though she's laughing. "It was totally a draw. We both had black eyes to prove it."

"Yeah." Al squeezes her hand once. "You'd probably win that fight now."

Ed blinks at clouds. Al doesn't add on to that though and she wonders how much Al understands about how Ed feels toward Winry still and how he feels about it. Ed isn't sure how she feels about it all. "It's a pity Winry didn't want to marry either of us," she says in the end.

WMWMWM

It starts with, "Ed, can I talk to you?"

Winry's words don't quite reach Ed's ears. She's noticing the new piercing in Winry's right ear and the charm on the earring that looks a bit like Ed's favorite spear design. It starts with Winry touching Ed's automail-scarred new flesh arm and how that makes butterflies jitter through Ed's belly. It starts with Ed covering Winry's hand with her own before she can second guess.

They don't talk for once. They don't argue. Winry leans forward. Ed leans up.

She doesn't believe it's actually happening until Winry's lips touch hers.

Ed closes her eyes and thinks at her younger self that maybe sometimes a girl can end up with a girl.

* * *

_AN_:_Written for the prompt: Fullmetal Alchemist, Girl!Ed/Winry, Never thought I'd get the girl_


End file.
